Ooma Masters the PR Game

I’m puzzled, though. If Sunrocket and Vonage have taught us anything, it’s that you can’t keep telephone customers (other than the early adopters) without a solid track record for reliability and quality – even with many millions of dollars in TV advertising. Customers need to trust their telephone. But the Ooma model asks customers to spend the money – and take the big risk – upfront (US$400 in hardware), on a startup. Oh, and they’re asking for that $400 from people they’re trying to attract with the promise of low-cost telephone service.

Oh – but they do have a celebrity involved – Aston Kutcher – and the tech ‘sphere is happy to cheerlead by reprinting their press releases (to their credit, the folks at CNet’s Crave are skeptical), so that’s something.

OOMA may have mastered the PR, but certainly not the technical or legal aspect of doing what they are claiming. They claim to do things with a telephone line that a telephone line won’t support or which the customer’s service agreement with the phone company forbids.

PR can get a serious looking launch, but it won’t keep the company going. The only thing I can’t predict is whether OOMA will lead or follow Vonage down the drain.

Thanks, Marshall. I have to say the techsphere has been sounding very much like the fashion press for a while now. I understand the desire to ramp traffic up quickly with lite, cheerful, fanboy material – it is a pageview world after all (or was until recently, anyway), and those parties look like a lot of fun – but I don’t think the techsphere truly understands how ephemeral an audience is when it’s given little more than effervescence.